How Not To Multitask

Computer multitasking is a myth. No processor can do stuff in a true “independent” way. What happens inside that silicon core is that there are a lot of small execution threads which are managed from a central point (in order to prevent them from colliding or accidentally use the same resource). But because everything happens so fast, from the outside, everything looks like magic. So, multitasking is in fact more like a single ball juggler than like a true, parallel and independent execution entity.

Knowing this, you will find much easier to accept the fact that the human brain is not designed to function in a “multitasking” mode. There was a time when I took great pride in doing 4 or 5 things at the same time. “Look, I’m multitasking’. Writing an email while talking to a client on the phone and browsing that contract I had to sign in the next 2 minutes. Yeap, I was really proud of me. Only I didn’t really have something to be proud of.

The Downside Of Multitasking

Squeezing a bunch of stuff in the same tiny timeframe will drastically affect the quality of it. You can bet that the email will have at least a few spelling errors (if not some serious semantic problems) and that the client on the phone will have some difficulties understanding what you’re talking about and, which is worse, that you may sign a very bad contract if you don’t take the time to really assess it.

The pressure of ”getting it done“ is so high, though, that we keep pushing and pushing, and try to squeeze more and more in that small timeframe.

But maybe the most annoying consequence of human multitasking is that our brain capacity to really focus on one topic at a time is almost completely destroyed. If you keep pushing it, you won’t be able to focus on something more complicated than writing an email. Or a few emails at a same time, to be more precise. The pressure of adding something new to the mix will make it impossible to stay more on the same page, so to speak.

Bottom line: in a few years you will be able to execute only very simple and short tasks. You may be multitasking but your tasks complexity will be at a kindergarten level. Believe me, I’ve been there.

How Not To Multitask

After a few years of being a multitasking manager, I eventually had to find a way to reverse the effects of my own choice. Namely, to regain my ability to perform complex tasks, with a high execution quality and in a reasonable amount of time. And, most important, NOT all at the same time.

Introducing the brain juggler: a few simple rules for doing stuff in a consistent way, without losing your focus and still keep the results within the required time constraints. Or, in other words, how to intelligently switch from one thing to another.

1. Spot The Small Chunks

Isolate the tiniest time unit for your tasks and order them by that, not by the topic or project. In other words, try to group them by how long do you think they’ll take: 2 minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour. And then start doing them from the shortest time interval to the longest.

My long time GTD readers will spot a similarity here: it’s the 2 minutes rule from the Getting Things Done ”bible“. Well, it is, to some extent, but it’s more than that. If you force your brain to do tasks of the same length for a certain period, it will warm up. Like a muscle.

So, don’t apply this only to the ”2 minutes“ tasks, do the same for the ”10 minutes“ tasks or the ”half an hour“ tasks. And the trick here is to keep a steady pace of the same length. It’s like cardio for the brain. Or intervals.

2. Balance Right And Left Hemispheres

As a true brain juggler, you don’t want to be ruled by only one of your brain hemispheres. In reality, this is happening most often than not, I have to admit this. Because you may have a specific job that requires exclusively big parts of your left or right hemisphere.

But this doesn’t need to be the rule. Even if you’re an accountant and your job involves your analytic hemisphere heavily, you can still find a way to make use of the other, more creative half. For instance, when you call your clients, try to invent a different salutation each time you get them on the phone.

I won’t say that if you don’t use one of your hemispheres it will shrink and become useless, because I don’t really know that. All I know is that switching them constantly helped me a lot. It’s a little awkward at the beginning but in time you’ll get better at it.

3. Log Constantly

That means you should find the time to log what you did, or at least important parts of it. When I started to work on my iAdd app, I didn’t do any type of logging. Until one day I realized I wrote the same code three times! And that’s because I always rushed to implement the next feature, without taking the time to log what I already did.

Of course, you can’t log every little thing you do. But each big project you start or finish may have some sort of a ”login“ or ”logut“ routine, spaces where you should take the time to write down what you actually did.

Logging will create a very necessary loop, a cut in the time / space continuum you’re working in. A separation of the beginning and the end. In multitasking, you don’t have such separations, you kinda live on the same level. No beginning and no ends. And that’s what makes you so confused at the end of the day: did I actually finish what I had to do?

4. Surround Yourself With Intelligent Walls

This is about the fine art of avoiding interruptions. It’s the road from how to say no (and, conversely, to what to say yes) up to what kind of tasks do you really want to take on, all that while building an invisible line of intelligent walls which will stop the flood of your daily tasks.

Yes, most of the time we’re forced to do more in less time because the task hose is bigger and bigger. Well, shrink that valve. Make it smaller. You won’t die if you won’t do any single thing that is thrown at you. On the contrary.

There may be situations when we do have to do whatever it takes to get the job done. But those are exceptional times. They don’t have to be the rule. If they are, then you’re living in a permanent crisis and you really have to talk to somebody about that.

5. Assess And Improve

Do a weekly review, for starters. Try to assess not only the number of projects you finished, but also your overall activity and mood. Were you joyful or stressed? Were you happy about what you did or not very much so?

If logging will create a loop for identifying your beginning and ends, assessing will create the basis of your processes improvement (you will, of course, assess by using the very same logs you produced).

The more you assess, the more you read your own logs, the better you’ll become. You will be able to evaluate the time required by your tasks more accurately, you will be able to juggle left and right hemisphere more often and you will definitely become way better at creating those intelligent walls between you and the harsh world outside. Which exists, of course, only to enslave us in endless tasks and projects.

***

When I was a kid and we were going to the circus, I wasn’t impress by the animals. As a matter of fact, I always thought it’s sad to make them do stupid tricks for our amusement. But I was very much impressed with the jugglers.

And if I look at myself 30 years after, very little has changed. I’m still impressed with jugglers, especially if they do the tricks with their brains, and not with their hands.

How An iPhone, An iPad And A Mac Are Shaping My Digital Life

As a digital nomad, I do spend a lot of time processing and evaluating information. But the “nomad” part of being a digital nomad means I do it mostly when I’m on the road. I do not have a fixed office space. I work in a variety of places, from shared offices to coffee shops (most of the time), my own home or even parks (when weather allows me, that is). I did have an office for more than 10 years, but got rid of it after selling my company, two years ago.

To make a long story short, due to the fact that I work pretty much everywhere, I realized that my digital life has certain particularities. I’m using only 3 devices: an iPhone, an iPad and a MacBookPro. Each of them has its own usage pattern and I find it increasingly interesting to try to understand them. Since I’m a digital value creator myself, I am also interested in other people digital habits, especially what type of activity is spread over what type of device. But more on that in the end. For now, let’s start with the iPhone.

iPhone Usage Patterns

I own an iPhone for about 3 years, since the initial version. Didn’t buy an iPhone 4 yet, mostly because I don’t have any FaceTime counter parts (at least that I am aware of) to make it worth. For development I can get along pretty ok with a 3GS. I can safely ignore the retina display and the speed, I’m ok with the 3GS and I will not get rid of it until the next iteration (iPhone 5, most likely).

Emergency Info Check

I keep a number of notifications alive, like new friendship requests from Facebook, replies form Twitter and PayPal (yeah, I do love those daily tiny alerts telling me that people are still buying my books or that I just received some affiliate payment). I try to keep the number of these notifications relatively low in order to preserve battery life.

Email

I seldom answer emails on my iPhone. If I do, it means I place a really high priority on the person that sent that message (so if you get a “sent from my iPhone” signature in my email messages, be happy, I really value our relationship. Or the message was really burning, make your pick ). I have only 3 main email accounts and I’m using the iPhone unified Inbox to scan them a few times a day. Especially at red lights (if I’m driving), or while exercising. I eliminate the vast majority of garbage and leave the rest for further processing.

Facebook

I do answer Facebook friendship requests using my iPhone. The Facebook app in the iPhone is (now) pretty stable and relatively easy to use. I still hate the fact that I can’t unfriend somebody using it, but that’s it. I also answer emergency messages, sent using Facebook messaging system, if any.

Twitter

I’m only responding to push notifications like direct messages an replies. From time to time I do some impulse tweeting. Lately, I drastically downshifted my Twitter presence.

iAdd

I manage my tasks and projects with my own iOS app, called iAdd. It’s a universal app, which means I can use it both on my iPhone and my iPad. On the iPhone I stay mostly in Do. Meaning I just see what’s the next task or event and process it (either reDecide it or mark it as Done). Every once in a while, especially since I’m hit with some sudden inspiration (which tends to happen at least once a day) I use it to quickly brainstorm some ideas in Assess. It’s not uncommon also to send the freshly brainstormed idea to my own email from within iAdd.

If you’re not familiar with the terms Assess, Decide or Do, I recommend you to have a look at the ebook which outlines the productivity framework on which iAdd is based.

StumbleUpon

I’m still an active user in StumbleUpon (you can friend / follow me here) which means I get a considerably high number of shares each day. Until SU launched they iPhone app it was a real chore to empty my StumbleUpon toolbar. Today I’m using their iPhone app. It’s fast and (again, now) pretty stable.

iPad Usage Patterns

I own an iPad for about six months and no, I do not have any regrets that I didn’t wait to get an iPad 2 directly. I’m very satisfied with my current 32G 3G. Ironically, the 3G part of it it’s something I didn’t use yet, to be honest, since I already have a data plan on my iPhone. I don’t see any reason to pay twice for the same service. Oh, and I’m also going to tell you upfront that the term “couch computing” is very appropriate for the iPad. Meaning I’m using it mostly on my couch. I’m pretty sure that the location is also shaping a lot of its usage patterns.

Facebook

Since Facebook doesn’t have yet an iPad app (and third party apps are still pretty rough on the edges) I use it in Safari. I do all my Facebook activity (as sparse as it is nowadays) from within my iPad, in Safari. I interact, answer to event or app invitations (if anyone is looking interesting enough for me) and follow my friends activity.

Twitter

I use my iPad for consuming timelines. I do like the official app for Twitter, especially the user interface paradigm. I do think they created something really valuable with those panes and I find it difficult to imagine other ways of consuming Twitter. I also engage in conversations or follow links, the webView implementation in Twitter client is relatively comfortable.

Email

I do answer my emergency messages (which are not answered already on my iPhone, that is) using the iPad email app. I also use it to clean up if there are any leftovers from my previous iPhone sessions, or if I didn’t have the time to use my iPhone for email at all. So, if you get a signature like “sent using my iDevice” in my emails, do know that it was sent from my couch. If that matters for you, of course.

iAdd

Almost my entire assessing and deciding are taking place in the iPad. Meaning I do organize my entire activity using the iPad. This may be due to the fact that the Mac version of iAdd is still in its very early stage, but also to the fact that the iPad is simply a very suitable device for that kind of activity. Once the planning is done I just do a sync with Dropbox. Next morning I sync my iPhone with Dropbox too and voila, my day is literally at my fingertips.

MacBook Pro Usage Patterns

I’m using a Mac for more than 4 years now. One of the oldest posts on this blog is witnessing the very moment of my conversion from a 10 years long Linux citizen to what others may call “an Apple fanboy”. I don’t consider myself an Apple fanboy, I just use the most appropriate tools for my tasks. It just happen to be a 17 inch MacBook Pro.

Email

I do all the heavy processing on my Mac. Meaning I follow conversations and I also try to keep a relatively organized Inbox. Gave up to Inbox zero, because it conflicts with my ADD framework.So I do keep messages in my Inbox, which is assimilated to my Assess realm. Every time a message will trigger an action, I will process it with iAdd and then delete the message. Basically, it means that if I don’t have any more messages in my inbox, I either finished every imaginable thing I may do with my life, or I’m dead. Again, if you want to know more about my happy separation from the “Inbox zero” concept, with all its pressures, go ahead and read my ebook.

Writing

All the articles for this blog (and every other activity related to writing, like presentations for conferences or courses) are written on the Mac. I created more than 2 years ago a blogging setup that makes me keep my blogging under a relaxed control, using MacJournal smart journals feature. Also, all the image processing is taking place on the Mac.

Coding

It goes without even saying that I code my projects on the Mac, although I admit I played a little bit with the idea of having a (very) striped down version of XCode (or anything like that) on my iPad. But I do realize this is pretty much impossible.

Twitter and Facebook

Every once in a while I fire up Firefox and leave two tabs open: one in Twitter and the other one in Facebook. But this is relatively uncommon since I do avoid any type of interaction when I’m working (writing or coding).

Conclusions

iPhone – emergency and impulse reactions

iPad – consuming information and planning (tasks, time, projects)

MacBook Pro – producing, evaluating and distributing digital value

***

What are your digital habits? Do you have / use more than one device to manage them? Please share your experience in the comments, I’m really looking forward to it.

How to Assess, Decide, Do with Pen, Paper and Magnets

Since I launched my ebook “Assess – Decide – Do: Natural Productivity” a little more than a month ago, many people have asked me if they need an iPhone or an iPad in order to implement the framework. While the fact that I wrote an app implementing the framework, called iAdd, is true, equally true is the fact that you don’t need the iPhone app in order to implement this system.

Here’s what you should have (click on the image for full size, goes for all images in this post):

Make sure you find a comfortable spot for your board. It should be close to your office but also far enough to be able to see the whole picture at any time. Hang the board up and put the magnets on it.

The leftmost part will host the red magnets, the center will host the yellow magnets, and the rightmost part of the board will have the green magnets.

Assess part - red magnets: stop and think

Assess + Decide - orange magnets: prepare

Assess + Decide + Do - green magnets: just do it!

Have the pen and paper handy. That’s it. You created your productivity setup. Really simple, right?

How To Use It

Now, how do you use this board?

Every time you think of something and need to stop thinking of it in order to move forward, write it down on a small piece of paper. Put it on the board on the leftmost part, under a red magnet. It doesn’t really need to be in the form of an action, just write it down as you see fit. Empty your mind and then get back to work.

It may be just a thought, or it may be something you wrote before in other forms. It may contain appointment data, or just ideas, or dreams. Everything you do at this stage about assessing.

Assess something

Now, after you start using the board like this, something interesting will happen: your mind will start to become clear, and at the same time the red part of the board will start to be really crowded. It’s ok. That’s the expected result.

Now, every time you feel like assessing what you wrote down, go on the board, choose a piece of paper and start working on it. Some of the papers will go directly to the recycle bin. Some of them will be rewritten as single tasks. Some of them will remain there and be brainstormed again and again until they evolve into a form you’re comfortable with. And some of them will become projects, a sequence of single actions.

Every time you feel you can’t add anything else to one of the pieces of paper, move it to the Decide section of your board (in other words, put a yellow magnet on it). As you slowly advance with processing, your Assess area should start to decompress, while the yellow area, the Decide realm, should start becoming crowded.

Decide on something

As for the Decide realm, processing should be fairly simple there. Once in Decide, you don’t edit a task anymore. You can only assign a context and a due date to it. That’s all you do in Decide. Fill in the contexts and the due dates. Then, if you really commit to performing the task, move it to Do.

In the Do section, using the green magnets, you now have tasks that you have decided to Do. You won’t assess them anymore, nor change their context or due date.

Do something

The trick is to understand that you act not only in the Do realm, crossing off tasks from a to do list, but also in the Assess (brainstorming, day dreaming, etc) and Decide (planning and signing the contract to perform the task).

Everything you add in Assess is just a thought. Everything you process in Decide is a firm contract stating that you will do that task in a specific time/space continuum: a context and a due date, that is. And everything you have in Do represents your daily list of things.

This is what I meant by levels of commitments instead of inboxes. You don’t really have an Inbox zero in ADD, unless you don’t come up with anything more to Assess, which is highly unlikely, at least as long you’re still alive.

ADD means switching back and forth between these 3 realms, and changing your focus accordingly. During the day you may feel the need to brainstorm, not to do, hence, you’ll be hanging out in Assess. Sometimes you just need to put more on your plate, so you’ll start to commit to more in Decide, by signing more contracts to future tasks. And sometimes, you just tackle pieces of paper from the Do realm, happy to finish them off.

Congratulations! You just had your first Assess – Decide – Do setup. The simplest setup ever.

Assess - Decide - Do with magnets

A Few Simple Rules

Don’t keep related information spread over two or more realms. For instance, don’t spread a project task in more than one category of Assess, Decide or Do. This will break the atomicity rule of the framework

Once a task goes past the Assess section, the body of the task can’t be modified anymore. You can only add contexts and due dates to it.

Put everything in the Assess realm first. Resist to the temptation to throw something you KNOW you will do directly to the Do realm. Pinning it first to Assess will help you integrate it into a bigger context.

Try to keep the same ink color. If you like red, keep it red, if you like green, keep it green in all realms. The color of magnets is enough to signal you the required behavior (red: stop and assess, yellow: decide, green: move on).

***

Why the 80/20 Rule Could Make You Less Productive

This is a guest post by Ruben Berenguel, @berenguel.

In this post I’ll explore some of the fallacies tied with the 80/20 rule applied to enhancing your productivity, as well as giving some possible solutions to its shortcomings. Read on, enjoy and share your view in the comments section!

If you are anything into increasing your productivity, I am sure you have heard of the 80/20 rule, or Pareto principle. In case you have not, the Pareto rule states that 20% of your inputs lead to 80% of your outputs. If you are running a company, 20% of your clients buy 80% of your production, to be clearer. This principle was observed by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in the beginning of the 20th century and was put into fame by The 4 Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferriss. From his book it spread to almost all time management and productivity advice out there, where it is usually stated as I wrote above. And this can be a very bad thing.

The problem with the Pareto principle is complex. When taught, it comes combined with Stephen Covey’s idea of life quadrants, where you split your tasks in 4 categories according to whether they are important and urgent (important–urgent, important–non-urgent, non-important–urgent, non-important–non-urgent). In this splitting, Quadrant 2 activities, corresponding to non-urgent–important tasks is where 20% tasks are assumed to be, and the tasks every life coach urges you to work on.  Thus, you start discarding all other things and work happily in Quadrant 2. But you made a mistake there.

You can’t mix apples and oranges as much as you can’t mix work and leisure. And productivity geeks are usually ripe for fluking at this: they treat leisure time as non-urgent–non-important. And then, relaxing with friends, mowing the lawn or playing with your kids is delayed or canceled to just work a little more in Quadrant 2. Your relationships degrade, your home turns to a mess and you become just a workaholic (NY Times). You have fallen to the productivity trap.

If you apply the 80/20 rule to your life, be sure to first make clear what are you giving up, and don’t mix leisure with work, or even different projects at work. Always keep some buffer time to relax, take it easy and disconnect from stress. More on this later, in the practical part of this post.

In addition to this bad application scenario, the Pareto principle is just a rule of thumb. It works sometimes, but sometimes it does not work (and can fail miserably). An interesting example comes from Paul Krugman in The New York Times (Graduates vs. Oligarchs, 20060227). But you don’t need to go that far. You can check your favorite example. I did, my random example: my favorite basketball team, Club Joventut Badalona (Wikipedia), in what I think was one of its best seasons, 2007-2008. Back in that season Rudy Fernández (NBA player, European champion & former world champion) was still playing for the team, and was its best scorer. Go for the numbers game and let’s see if the Pareto rule holds. The team made 2970 points, an 80% of that is roughly 2376. Rudy made 636 of these points… and 20% of the team roster made… 1377 points. You see? Even in this simple test, the Pareto principle doesn’t hold. There is more in a team that just the top players (usually).

There is more in your work life than your top tasks. Your overall work life works like a team: small tasks have its place, too, and help you achieve greater goods. But small tasks can be approached in different ways. Our language shapes the way we think (if you don’t believe me, read this article in Scientific American, 20090818: Does Language Shape the Way We Think?), and the way we approach tasks can change the end result as well.

• You should not spend your time in small tasks: Spending is here the key word. You should not spend time, never. Small tasks that may imply you are spending your time are constant mail checking, gossiping with your work mates, being in your kids play checking your iPhone.
• You should invest your time in small tasks: Investing is not the same as spending. You can invest your time in answering mail correctly, in creating a good relationship with your office mates, in enjoying time with your children.

You can’t really tell what can have a biggest output. There are always high yield activities that have a potential output thousands of times bigger than these small errands individually. For example, investing half an hour daily in writing an ebook will do more for your blog than spending half an hour daily in commenting in other blogs. Change your mind frames. What happens if you invest half an hour daily commenting in other blogs? Don’t you think it sounds better? Your ebook may be lousy and turn into nothing, and one of your random but well written and to the point comments may catch the attention of a book publisher and land you a writing position.

In the long run, small activities like this example give huge benefits, if done daily. They are like snowballs falling from a mountain. They may hit a tree on their way and disintegrate, or grow to engulf everything on its pass. The high yield activities sometimes are just big explosions: once you are done with them there is nothing more to drill, the well goes dry.

Now lets put all these ideas into real practice. When you want to apply the Pareto principle to your life, first split your activities in sets, like socializing, work-project1 or hobby-guitar. You want to split your time in big categories and then in sub-categories of it. A real life example would be (activities in no particular order):

• Work: Thesis, Project A, Project B, Teaching A, Teaching B, Student Questions.
• Blog: Post Writing, Guest Posting, Blog Commenting, Layout tweaking, Socializing.
• Leisure: Guitar Playing, Programming, Drawing, Reading, learning Icelandic.
• Others: Do things with my girlfriend, friends, work mates, play with my cat, parents.

Each of these tasks belongs to a different set, and each set depends on itself (well, not entirely: work and blog can be linked, leisure and others too) you can’t take time from leisure to move to work, for example, but could move time from blog to work. In each set you can split activities depending on which are more likely to result in more output. A clear example would be my thesis in the work set. Also, each item has also a big list of subtasks, for example, for my thesis it may look like:

• Corrections of current draft,
• Finish proof at page 54,
• Add corrections to Section 3,
• Start the next case,
• Correct again.

There is no task here that should not be done. I can not choose to not correcting again, or even starting the next case before correcting most gaps in the current version. Usually within a project if planning is correct there should be no unnecessary tasks, even in each set of tasks the best case is when there is nothing that you can give up without affecting the rest.

Of course a different game is where you spend your time. Spending your time 80% in your biggest work task is time-wise, it is something you definitely have to do with big impact. But giving some other work task 0% time is a big mistake. You have to assess your sets of activities and for each individual activity, its fundamental tasks. Once you have everything written down pick a red marker and start streamlining. Remove all tasks that are unnecessary for a project. Once you are done, remove all activities that are not fundamental. There may be none, it depends on how you write your set of activities. In my leisure time I could add watching TV, book shopping, idle web surfing and similar things, but I already choose to remove them. They are not fundamental, they should be part of other things (like going book shopping with my girlfriend, or watching TV at my parents).

Once you are done with this process you only have important activities left. Choose your biggest target for each set (that would be thesis, post writing, programming and girlfriend in my case), this is where most of your time should be spent, should be your highest value activity. For the rest, give them the time you can or they deserve. Maybe in some set you don’t have a clear ‘this is it’ task, then you can split the time you allocate to it accordingly. In my leisure set, programming is the most relevant, but not much than guitar playing or learning Icelandic. The only task I really don’t usually give time is drawing. Your mileage may vary, but think about what, when, how and overall, how much.

Sorting your tasks in sets will keep you from being a workaholic: there is a time for work and there is a time for playing. Go and apply it.

About the author: Rubén writes on Mostly Maths about programming, Linux and time management. A math PhD student and aspiring procrastinator, he writes about fighting time expenditure and continuous improvement.

iAdd For iPhone / iPad Now Syncs With Dropbox

It has been a very exciting time for me in the last few weeks. Not only I finished another ebook, one that is very close to me, called “Assess – Decide – Do: Natural Productivity” but I also finished a brand new version of iAdd, my iPhone / iPad implementation for the ADD framework. As a matter of fact, I’m still in the “eye of the hurricane” as we speak. The ebook is currently on pre-order now (for the next 20 hours and something) which means you can still get it at a discounted price and the latest version of iAdd for iPhone / iPad, 1.2,  is live on the AppStore. So, I’m right in the middle of action, knowing that the actual launch of the ebook will happen only after a few hours.

Yes, We Run On iPad Too

Noticed how I silently added the iPad suffix too? Well, that’s because iAdd is now natively working on the iPad too. The good news is that you don’t have to pay extra bucks for it. iAdd is a Universal app. You pay only once (and you pay 3.99 USD, for a limited period of time) and you get 2 apps. If we take into account the iPod users, well, you get 3 apps in only one.

That’s one of the most important features of the latest version of iAdd. It’s not an app running in compatibility mode, it’s specifically designed for iPad. You will notice that all the main interface elements have been designed specifically for iPad, and the data enter workflow has been completely rewritten (click to see full size).

Look, I’m A Landscape!

Another new feature of the version 1.2 will be autorotation. Any data input app should have this, especially on smaller devices like the iPhone. It’s much more comfortable to type, or even to read your tasks while your device is on landscape. As many of you noticed this was an important oversight of the first version of iAdd. Well, it’s fixed now.

Send Anything By Email

Another common suggestion from iAdd customer was a way to make the data accessible in many ways. Everybody agreed that the app is easy to use, but not having a way to share your data outside the device was perceived like an important limitation. Well, starting with version 1.2 you can send any information via email. You can send tasks, you can send events, you can send even projects or ideas and all the contained tasks / details within the projects or ideas will be automatically added. All you have to do is to add an email address and hit send.

Cloud Syncing Is The New Black

As useful as it may be, email is kinda obsolete. I mean it’s a very good back-up solution, but the nicest thing of all is to have cloud syncing. Well, you asked for it, you got it. iAdd version 1.2 sync your data completely with Dropbox via Edge, #g or WiFi. You can now have access to all your tasks, projects or ideas from anywhere. Dropbox released an API for interacting with its widely popular cloud storage service only a few weeks ago but when I saw the press release, I knew I had to work with it.

The API is really fresh, so there might be some inconsistencies. I took all the measures I could think of to ensure a proper backup and syncing of your data, but as always, bad things may happen. Please use the support page listed in iTunes to give me a very thorough description of what wen bad. I’ll fix it.

The most common use case for syncing is when you have 2 devices: an iPhone that goes with you everywhere and an iPad which is more static. You can also have any combination of iPod, iPhone and iPad, of course. That’s one of the main reasons we have an iPad version too. You can use iAdd on any device, with its local database and once you hit sync, your information will be updated. As in most common syncing algorithms, I used the “most recent wins” approach. There are many ways in which you can sync your data, but for a sequential use case (not a concurrent access) this one seemed the most appropriate.

Workflow Improvements And Bug Fixes

There are also tons of bugfixes in this release and I won’t stop to mention each and every one of them. Maybe the most important one is the date selection mechanism which has been drastically improved. There are also a lot of new workflow enhancements and here is just a short list of what are the most important ones:

• a new context based view in the Decide realm
• now you can send a task back to Decide even before you finished it
• a task can be detached from a project, becoming a single task
• a task can be assigned to another idea
• a single task can be promoted to a project

You can see a full list of what’s new in the iTunes listing page.

It’s All Part Of The Framework

But the biggest competitive advantage of all would be of course the fact that iAdd implements the Assess-Decide-Do framework in a very handy and easy to use application. It’s part of the bigger framework, one that could allegedly be used not only for life management, but also for simpler and more mundane tasks like blogging or shopping. That’s right, you can use iAdd to plan your next blog post, or your next shopping session. There are even 2 sample chapters in the ebook which are talking specifically about that: how to use iAdd for blogging and for shopping. Not to mention that one third of the ebook is a very comprehensive manual of iAdd.

So, if you like iAdd, I strongly recommend getting the ebook “Assess – Decide – Do: Natural Productivity” which is, as I already said, on pre-order until tomorrow at 7 AM, Bucharest time. The price is 27 USD, but you can get it at 20 USD while on pre-order. Not to mention that I’ve also thrown in 30 promo codes for the new version of iAdd (of which I have less than 10 now, so you should really hurry up).

You get both the ebook and the app on a very good deal. The bad part of the deal is that will expire in less than 24 hours.

The Death Of The Deadline As We Know It

I was a big fan of deadlines. Chasing them. Crossing them off of my todo list. Striving to meet them. Spending countless hours just to prepare myself for this date with my deadline. Oh, the feeling of pride when I was there in time to make it. The inner power and fulfillment… Yes, that was a very interesting experience.

I’m not into deadlines anymore but I do remember the feeling of satisfaction I got from crossing my deadlines off. I still enjoy doing things, I’m just not into deadlines anymore. As simple as it seems, this is a fundamental difference.

The Word

Have you ever really thought what is the meaning of the word “deadline”? It has the word “death” in it. Never wondered why? Because a deadline is a line of death. Once you meet that line, you kill the task. You take its life away. You conquered it. You extended your presence onto its territory, occupied it and now you have the right to eliminate it from your system. That’s a highly motivating psychology. Also, it’s a very disempowering one.

Thinking in terms of “death” lines will make you assimilate the end of a task with its death. Doing things will mean kill one task after another. Slashing tasks over a to do list has this feeling of power: I killed 32 enemies today, I feel good. Tasks are not your enemy. Nobody is, in fact. You just pretend that they are, so you can use the “warrior” resources you already have deep down in your ancestral behavior. The pressure of doing more and more exalted our warrior style way over the safety level.

We position ourselves as conquerors of our own task land. What lies in front of our work day is a field filled with enemies that have to be eliminated. Every day is a battle. Many productivity techniques are using this subliminal approach. What you have to do is a burden. You have to take it away, to overcome it, to eliminate it. The more you eliminate, the better you’ll feel. Train yourself to become better at killing tasks.

At a certain level, this psychology is, as I already said, very motivating. Fighting for our survival is deeply wired in our unconscious memory. This is why we find it easy to understand this approach. Fear of our own death will push us to kill the “other”. And the “other” in this case, is clearly written on our daily to do list. If we don’t kill “them”, they will kill us, so we’d better jump off of our beds, rush into the subway and take position in our daily trenches, suitably camouflaged as desks.

But the downside of this approach, its disempowering part is that, by transforming your tasks into your personal enemies, you’ll eventually become so good at deadlines that life itself will look as a deadline. You’ll rush towards the biggest deadlines of all: your own death. Deadline by deadline, task killed by task killed, you’re going to eventually cross the final episode off of your to do list with great satisfaction. The ultimate project management victory: I crossed off my own death today.

For A Liveline Philosophy

Forget deadlines. Instead let’s have livelines. A liveline is different from a deadline in that it creates a new starting point. The point where you start something on the foundation you just finished, something alive. You restart the movement.

In Assess – Decide – Do, your tasks will always generate a new cycle. You’re not spending time only in Do. You’re also spending time in Assess or in Decide. Each time you finish a task in Do, you will have to feed your Assess realm with the results. You will evaluate feed-back. In this respect, a project is never “finished” in ADD. The graphical representation of a project in Assess – Decide – Do will look more like a spiral than like a Gantt diagram. I agree it’s a little difficult to understand this concept, especially if you’re coming from a long traditional task management experience.

A liveline will never ask you to cross a task over. You always have the possibility to re-start the liveline by sending it back to Decide, and, from there, back to Assess. A liveline will be met only if all its initial stages (Assess and Decide, namely) are completed and fulfilled. And every liveline will generate in turn several ideas, lessons or potential tasks.

A liveline means we’re taking the “death” out of the deadline. We’re taking the pressure out, we’re taking the urge of finishing it so we can get back to our regular life. Because there will be no dichotomy between what you “have” to do and your regular life. It will all take place in the same time/space continuum.

I hear you loud and clear: what about commitments? What about promises? What about our corporate life where we have to finish tasks before competition, otherwise we’re out of business? Well, if you do established a certain end date to a task, keep it. It means you Assessed it right and you also took the right Decision about it. If you spent enough time in those two realms, nothing can go wrong.

Every Do imbalance is in fact a liability you carry on from the previous realms. If you can’t finish a task in the specified time and space constraints, it means something went wrong on the Assess and Decide realms. Completing a task is not a function of the Do, is also a function of Assess and Decide. Until you won’t realize that, it will be really difficult to understand the benefits of the Assess – Decide – Do framework.

How about “unexpected” events? Let’s say you did your best in Assess to anticipate every possible outcome and you properly allocated time and space resources in Decide.And still, some catastrophe happened. A power outage 2 hours before the client presentation or a traffic jam which delayed your presence at that important meeting. Well, things are happening. It doesn’t mean you’re off track. Back to Assess.

In a traditional approach, you would consider the undone task a liability. In the best case, you would have tried to reschedule or postpone. Meaning you would still keep yourself in the Do realm. Stuck on the deadline. And for as long as you’re stuck in the same mindset, the problem will never disappear.

Take a leap of faith. Go out. Make a lateral step. Transform that deadline into a liveline. A liveline will give you flexibility not only at the action level, but also at the perception level. Start assessing what went “wrong” and see what could you’ve done better. There are many reasons for what you can’t really Do a thing. Keeping yourself only in Do will hide those details, will lock you in the Do box. You can’t see the real picture if you’re not taking time to assess.

Perhaps the presentation wasn’t ready. Perhaps the client wasn’t ready to receive your message. Perhaps the meeting wasn’t very good for your career. There are so many things you should ponder about what’s happening around you and still, because you’re pressuring on Do, you skip them. Or you avoid them consciously because they won’t “help” you in any way.

Inject Some Life Into That Deadline

And make it a liveline. By now, you should have understand that there is a little bit of a word game here: dead versus alive. I deliberately pushed the comparison a little bit. Of course you will commit to doing things in Assess – Decide – Do too. Of course you will do the best to meet your own expectations, at least. What’s different, though, from the traditional productivity approach, is an unprecedented degree of flexibility.

In a traditional approach, if something went wrong, you would at best re-schedule and try to refill the Do realm with that task. Or lose it all together. In Assess- Decide – Do, you will reintroduce the task into your Assess realm. Of course you can just Re-Decide it, and in many day by day circumstances, that would be the expected reaction, but you also have another realm to work with, Assess.

I will avoid using a term like “planning” when it comes to Assess. You do much more than planning. You evaluate, you imagine, you wait, you dream about it, you play with the task as in a dream world. The degree of flexibility offered by the mere idea that you can be productive while Assessing is incredible.

And finally, one of the most important benefits of this bouncing back and forth is the organic rearrangement of your activity. Projects, tasks and events will start to fall into their places. The initial feeling will be one of melting, of losing control. But after this rather scary period, another feeling will come into place: the feeling of flow. There is an inner capacity of natural order, of simple flow from one project to another.

The deadline carries with it a threat. If you won’t do it, something or somebody must die. In 99,99% of the cases, the task will die, and you will actually kill it. But a liveline will not have any threat associated. It’s like “doing nothing” and yet “doing it”. A good deal of resistance to implementing Assess – Decide – Do will come, ironically, from the fact that you associate “doing” things with pressure. And when you’re not feeling pressure you’re going to feel like you’re doing nothing. If there’s no deadline it means there’s nothing to do, right? Wrong. you can do things in the absence of a deadline, just by knowing that the results of your work will not get lost in a to do planner, but they’ll be part of a bigger, flexible system that you can work with. I know, you associated doing with pressure. But no, with a liveline there is no pressure. And you can still do things.

Now, I hear you for the final question: are one going to do more using Assess – Decide – Do than using any other productivity framework? My answer to this question will always be: “more” is not automatically “better”. The consumerist obsession put a lot of weight on “more”. If you live in the deprivation of only one realm, spending your entire life in the Do realm, “more” becomes important. “More” is a way of measuring what you’re Doing. But once you get out of the prison of Doing, spending time in Assess and Decide, “more” will lose its meaning as a measurement tool. It will be only a choice, an assessment. I can Do more today, or I can spend more time Deciding or Assessing.

***

Ok, this was a teaser. What you just read is just a chapter from my upcoming ebook: “Assess – Decide – Do: Natural Productivity”. The ebook will be launched this Friday, on September 17th, but you will be able to pre-order it at a significant discount starting this Wednesday. Many concepts you read in this article and seemed a little foggy will come to life by reading the entire ebook. It’s a 150 pages text, grouped in 3 main parts. The last one is a very thorough guide of iAdd for iPhone, the app which puts the power of this framework literally in your hand.

If you’re a blogger, your audience is revolving around productivity or lifestyle design and you feel like reviewing the ebook, you can have a chance to get a copy of it for free, as long as you commit to review it on your blog. It doesn’t have to be a positive review, just an honest one. I’ve done this before with other ebooks I wrote and I was positively surprised by the results. After the ebook launch, next week, I will also do a round up of the reviews and post links to the blogs who published them. So, you’re not only getting the ebook for free, you also get a link back to your blog from quite a popular site. So, if you’re into it, just hit me up with an email in which you’re telling me your blog address, a few words about yourself and why would you like to review it. You should also tell me if you want to become an affiliate (you may include affiliate links in your review, if you want).

Other than that, I’m really looking forward to this Friday, September 17th, this is one of the most interesting livelines I’ve set up lately .

Natural Productivity – Introducing iAdd for iPhone

I’m really excited as I write this: iAdd for iPhone is live on the App Store [and that's an iTunes link for the impatient one]. It’s been a long journey, but I’m finally there.

Why is this so important for me? Why is this not just another product launch in the day to day routine of launching products? Because this is what you’re supposed to do if you’re running (even a very small) software company, right? You’re releasing products.

Well, iAdd is special. iAdd is part of a bigger personal breakthrough. If you’re just an iPhone app junkie (which means we’re sharing a big common interest here) go ahead and click on the iTunes link, buy the app, (it’s only 2.99 USD) and start using it. It will change your life.

But if you’re a little bit curious about how I came up with this productivity app, take 7 to 10 minutes off from your regular duties and start reading, I promise it won’t take more than that.

Being A Productivity Junkie

I had my share of GTD from its early days, back in 2005-2006. I was fascinated by the system, excited by its promise (“mind like water”) and extremely enthusiast by the actual implementation. I started to GTD in 2006 and I was an evangelist until 2008. But at some point, something started to feel a little bit wrong.

I was still doing incredibly more “stuff” than before using GTD and I also was pretty balanced when it came to personal / professional life. But then again, something was out of sync with the bigger picture. In a few months I had to admit that I was over GTD. Precisely, over the GTD hype. Just click on that link and you’ll find out more about what I kept and what I threw out form my GTD experiment.

This was the beginning of a long and somehow confusing process. There were many situations in which I needed the power of GTD, but then again there were situations in which GTD as a framework seemed inflexible and downright awkward. I fell off the GTD wagon and didn’t embarked on a new train.

Even more, the whole productivity thing started to feel artificial and unnatural. That was the time when I discovered what I still call the productivity trap. Just read the article and you’ll know what I mean.

Natural Productivity – What The Frack Is This?

Sometimes more than a year ago, during one of my trips to Thailand, I suddenly discovered something so simple, yet so powerful, that left me puzzled for a few weeks. Please stop smiling and don’t even think to write some smart comments about what people are usually discovering in Thailand, because I know what you mean . Right now I’m talking about productivity, ok?

So, I discovered that we’re not always in the same state. We, as human beings, are not designed only to get things done. We’re not made only to Do. We’re also made to Assess our environment and to Decide whether or not we’re going to do something. Some of you may say that this is a very simple discovery. And they’ll be perfectly right, by the way. I told you it was something really, really simple.

A few weeks later, my own life management workflow, called Assess – Decide – Do was ready. From that point, several approaches were made, including ADD for programming and ADD for relationships. Feel free to dig into these articles if you wanna know more about the framework.

Right now, just for the sake of the presentation, I will rehash some of the concepts, just to give you a short heads up:

Assessment is the state in which you analyze, compare, learn and store your experiences.

Decision is the state in which you project your next reality. You’re coming to this stage after finishing an assessment session completely.

Doing is the state in which you’re using focus to create your next reality. You’re doing only after you have a clear decision to follow.

Each of these states are maintained by your focus and you’re shifting from one state to another by being in flow.

Flow is not a measurable concept although we can refer to it as bigger, lower or we can define some quality of it. Flow is usually perceived as your capacity of enjoying and alignment with your current context. Most of what we call joy, happiness or exhilaration is in one way or another a variation of a great flow we’re experiencing.

If focus will be the main tool for creating your reality we may refer to the flow as the master glue for keeping the pieces together. A healthy flow will allow you to go from a complete assessment to an atomic decision and that will lead to a totally immersed activity of doing.

Well, that’s what I call natural productivity.

iAdd WorkFlow

Now back to the iPhone app. How do you implement this workflow using the iPhone app?

First of all, the app only has 3 tabs, each one corresponding to a specific realm. They’re even named like that: “Assess”, “Decide” and “Do”. Also, each tab has an icon which will intuitively let you know what you’re allowed to do in that specific realm.

Assess has a “+” sign as an icon, meaning that’s the place where you add stuff to your plate. This is where you overload your system with data. The theme color is red, which means: “stop and empty your brain” before moving further.

Decide has a “?” sign as an icon, meaning that’s the place where you decide if, when and where are you going to perform a certain task or to attend to a specific event. The theme color of this realm is orange, which means: “pay attention and be prepared”.

Do has a “-” sign as an icon, meaning that’s the place where you actually take out stuff from your system, by doing it. You cross of things as you do them. The theme color of this realm is green, which means: “you’re good to go”.

Pretty simple, right? Exactly, that’s the ideas behind the whole framework. Now, what happens after you add something to the system, after you’re using your “+”?

Well, you can edit that piece of information, right in the Assess realm, choosing what type of info is: task, idea, event or project.

Once you’re ready, you can either send it to Decide, in case you wanna decide when and where are you going to do it, either assign it to a collection, meaning you’re going to decide about it later.

Once in the Decide realm, all you have to do is to set a date, a place (most of the time you’re going to use a previously defined Context for the place) and a priority. After you assigned that, you’re ready to send it to Do. You won’t be able to send a task without a due date. Simply because a task without a due date is a task upon you didn’t decided yet.

From here, you can either do that task, and delete it after that, either skip it, in which case the task will appear as overdue. Only if the task is overdue, you can start the reverse process, sending the task back to Decide and from Decide to Assess, if you want. Most of the time you will only send it back to Decide, to assign a new due date.

That’s all there is to it. Really.

Before launching it I used the app for more than 2 months. One thing I noticed is that my overall state was significantly steadier than before using it. Not too much inner pressure for doing certain things, not too much anxiety. I still had a lot to do during those 2 months. And I’m a really focused guy and I do like to do my stuff, so it wasn’t about me becoming lazy. It really had something to do with the way I structured my activities. I won’t say that iAdd for iPhone will completely eliminate anxiety from your life, but it will certainly give you a much steadier structure. Why?

Tasks in Assess aren’t going to be done. Not yet. And that’s ok. You don’t really have to. Even more, they’re not even tasks, until you “sign a contract” to do them. They’re just things you’re assessing. You can modify them, you can even delete them, you can store them in a collection for further reference.

In Decide, you set the context and time for a certain task. At that moment, the piece of information from Assess becomes an actionable entity. A task or an event. You’re not assessing it anymore, you’re making a decision. But that’s all there is to it, only a decision. Until you actually send it to the Do realm, the task can stay in the Decide realm for as long as you’re comfortable with.

And in Do, you don’t have to focus on how or why (it’s been done in Assess), nor on when and when (it’s been done in Decide), all you have to do is… well, doing it.

This approach fits really well in your daily routine. You may have hours (or even days) in which you love to be a doer. Focus on the Do and start crossing off tasks. Sometimes, you’re in a planning mood. Just go in Decide and start allocate tasks and events to specific contexts and days. You don’t have to do them, just sign the contract that you’re going to do them at some point. And sometimes you’re just brainstorming (that’s the professional term for daydreaming, by the way). That too is perfectly ok. You are allowed to do this. Just write it down in the Assess realm and enjoy the process. You may turn those ideas into projects later if you really want to.

The Upcoming Ebook On ADD

But wait. There’s more. While I was working on all of these ADD related tasks (like the blog posts above, the app, etc) I realized there’s need for an organized way to put all these concepts together.

So, I started to write an ebook which will deal exclusively with this ADD framework. I’m over half way to it, and I expect it to be ready in a few weeks. I don’t know the exact date (I’m still assessing it), but I’m confident that it will be ready soon. Confident enough to give you a small teaser here, that is.

You may even consider this a soft pre-launch. I know there’s quite a hype on the blogs lately with these soft launches. Well, now I have mine too.

iAdd On The App Store

Now, that was really all about the app. You can go to the App Store now, by clicking this link and buy it. 2.99 USD is a really small price to be paid for putting your life together. Wow, sometimes I feel like the worst salesman in the world, you know?

The price will stay at 2.99 USD for a while, but as I will roll out the next features (because there is a roadmap which will include a lot of amazingly interesting features, and I mean it) well, as I will roll out these features, I may shift it up a little. I’m not sure yet, I’m still assessing it, so when I’ll make a decision about it, you’ll know.

Until then, enjoy it.

How To Be Productive without Becoming a Productivity Freak

Productivity is usually a good thing. Usually. Not always.

Too much GTD or too much effectiveness in your life can become annoying at some point. Being highly productive can really help you become some sort of a freak, even if you obviously don’t want that. All those lists, thoughts capturing devices, advanced task processing systems. All those fancy words like “next actions”, “hipster cards” or “mind like water”. All those tasks carefully squeezed into your agenda, well, all that could give you a very hard time in a normal, non-productivity related, social conversation. To be honest, most of the people I heard talking about “mind like water” were doing it mostly like a waterfall, not like a still lake. I think you know the type: hyper-active, super talkative and proud of the last uber cool productivity gadget he bought or the last productivity blog post he read.

The good news is that you can still be productive while avoiding the pitfalls of a productivity freak syndrome. Here are 7 verified ways to help you avoid being left alone in the middle of a vivid social conversation in which you just tried to talk about – exactly! – nothing else but productivity.

1. Don’t Plan the Fun

Do you have items like “go out in the park with the kids” in your to do lists? Or something like “have a romantic dinner with my partner”? Ditch this. Immediately. You can’t really plan the fun in your life. It’s a contradiction in terms. If you plan it, it’s not fun anymore. It’s just another chore. Another task to be slacked from your to do list.. Having fun is a spontaneous activity and cannot be confined into a productivity system. The very thought of productively increasing your fun makes me laugh.

How many times you attended to a party and had no fun at all? Well, I’m sure that behind being at that party there was a productivity “reason”.  Maybe you don’t call it “productivity”, but it was something like “cross out that thing from my agenda”. Mark the task done somehow. Which, of course, you did. Only there wasn’t any fun involved. How many lousy romantic dinners you had? I bet every time you had them you looked up every single detail in advance and made sure everything will be just fine. Only it wasn’t. You had no fun at that dinner.

Planning the fun in your life is the most subtle yet powerful attempt of productivity to kill your spontaneity. Your normal reactions to reality stimulus. You can schedule in advance to DO something, that’s true, but you can’t schedule in advance to FEEL something.

Instead of planning your fun activities, you should just make some time box in your schedule for yourself. If you want to spend time with other people, your friends or your kids, just make some space in your time schedule and be there. Show up. And see where it goes. Don’t plan it, just watch it unfolding ahead. If you want to throw a great party, by all means, do all the preparations. Just don’t expect the party to automatically rock just because you had fantastic food. Likewise, if you want a romantic dinner, just be romantic, don’t plan the next actions. Do something unexpected or extraordinaire. Which, by the way, it’s the complete opposite of being productive.

2. Share Your Learning

Share what you learned about productivity with your friends. Ask for their opinion. The first thing you’ll notice is that all that information is now filtered through your own perceptions and experiences. A lot of what you thought is important is now modeled by your own needs. While you’re talking with somebody else about all those new concepts or ideas you’re slowly getting rid of the initial hype and start to have a better understanding of the system altogether. (Generally speaking, sharing what you’ve learned is  great way to internalize everything you want to learn.)

The second thing you can realize by sharing is to inform your peers about the results you had by using that specific system. No need to talk about technical stuff now, just simple things like: I’ve done twice the things I was usually doing on a Tuesday so far. Watch for their reactions. You’ll be surprised to notice that being productive has little if no impact whatsoever in your close relationships. Yet you unconsciously hope that being productive will enhance your social or intimate life too.

The most important point here is to create a feed-back loop. A way to check out your social status every now and then and see if you’re not deluding yourself. Being productive is meant to do things faster and better, not to alienate you from your friends or colleagues. Don’t use the productivity hype as an identity creator: I’m the GTD guy, or the 4 hours work week guy. The more you do that, the more you’ll be identified with “the productivity freak next office.” Just because you’re updated to the latest productivity news and other people aren’t, doesn’t make you better than them.

3. Listen To Others

There is this cultural norm of associating productivity with pro-activity. Start new projects. Ignite conversations. Initiate new ventures. While this is certainly very important, it also creates a very nasty habit of not listening to other people. Listening is a fantastic resource. How many times you found a solution to something just by listening to other guys? I know I did this literally hundreds of times. Just listen carefully, because your question was certainly asked before and there is already somebody who knows the answer.

Listening is fundamental in identifying problems. Maybe you have the skills to do something faster and better, but if you don’t know exactly what you have to do, then what’s the point? I see more than often those productivity gurus offering ready made solutions to problems far more complicated than they realize. They have a limited set of solutions and they try to apply them to every problem they encounter., regardless of its complexity. Just because they “know” that works. Only, of course, it doesn’t.

Without listening and acknowledging the real problems your productivity skills are worthless. You’re just a talkative guy making more trouble then it solves, while bragging too in the process. Not the nicest personal brand you can build, right? Listening is not a productive activity in itself, although it can be enhanced: there really is an art of listening, you know. But listening, combined with your productivity skills can help you become a useful person too, rather then becoming just a freak annoying people around.

4. Keep Things Simple

The promise of productivity subtly invites you to bring more into your life. You can manage it, right, so bring more. More business, more relationships, more everything. You load yourself with tons of not really necessary stuff just because you can. Well, you could also run on a roof of a running train, with a little bit of training. But why would you do something like this on a regular basis? You could learn how to juggle with 5-6 balls at the same time, becoming better than a circus artist. Ok, but why would you do it?

Almost any productivity system out there puts a big emphasis on how to manage everything in your life. But why would you wanna do that to everything in your life? Why do you want to become productive on all the things in your life, including stuff you don’t need anymore? Instead of trying to manage everything, I think it’s better to get rid of the unnecessary entirely. Why trying to manage something you don’t really need?

This subtle invitation to bring more stuff into your life is the most dangerous thing you can do when you decide to become productive. You don’t really need that extra stuff. It’s like a competition between people racing on roofs of running trains, just because they can run on roofs of running trains. Who’s going to really win such a stupid race? The good side of being productive and effective is that you can do more in less time. Great, now go out and enjoy life, instead bringing more work into the system.

5. Accept and Manage Interruptions

The productivity flow assumes you’re there 100%, 8 hours out of 8, 5 days a week. If you’re a normal person. If you have a busier schedule, it means even more. Well, reality is different. You’re not there 8 full hours. At some point, life will get in the way somehow. You will be exposed to interruptions. It’s called hazard or the unpredictable. And the way you react to interruptions is almost always the key to a productive approach.

Accept them. Manage them. Respond to those stimuli, because there lies your real growth. Planning everything ahead will not make you grow. It will barely create a comfort zone around, but not more. It’s this constant stimulus-response dance that gives you new insights and perspectives. This is where you learn and do your real actions. A day with a perfect agenda is not a day that will make you evolve as a human being. It can give you a tricky sense of satisfaction, but if no “deranging” interruption occurred, you must start asking yourself questions.

“Life’s what’s happening when you’re busy making plans”, said John Lennon and I totally agree with him. Being productive is not always equal with being happy and fulfilled. I really don’t think the goal is to become the perfect business machine out there, but to live your life. A life filled with unexpected, interruptions, change of plans and contexts. Avoiding this by hiding under the “high productivity” blanket will not only make you lose all the fun, but it will surely create an almost visible aura of “freak”-ness around you.

6. Daydreaming Is Not Dangerous

One of the key principles of GTD, “emptying your mind” has become one of its biggest flops. Because when you empty your mind in GTD style, you’re not really emptying. Behind every mental throw up of an idea, of a potential project or task, there’s a continuous, humming thought of being productive. Every time you jot down something, you’re doing it because you want to be productive. So, even if you think you’re emptying your mind, you’re not really doing it: you continuously think about how to be more productive.

A productivity freak is a person who’s always in search of a new gadget or system. His mind is simply obsessed with the whole productivity process. Sometimes, those guys really make a business out of this, teaching other people how to become productive. They’re the lucky ones. They found an outlet for the obsession. But most of the times, the productivity freaks are just circling around, stuffing new productivity techniques in their head until they forget why they wanted to be productive in the first place.

Empty your mind from useless stuff. But do allow yourself to have thoughts that will never grow into a task. Imagine things. Picture new realitites. Visualize new contexts or situations. You may call this day dreaming. And yes, you will be right about that. But day dreaming is one of the most productive ways to empty your mind. To switch its focus from the glitches you encountered and allow it to regroup and find new ways to tackle an issue. One of the core qualities of a dream is its impermanence. Once finished, it will fly away from your mind. Leaving it empty, refreshed and clean.

7. Stay Healthy

Being highly productive is often associated with being a busy guy. In fact, you become productive because you are a busy guy and want to minimize that load. Alas, you end up by increasing it. It’s an addiction. The higher your productivity level, the busiest you become. You enjoy so much the thrills you get from being productive that you start putting more and more on your plate just to trigger that feeling again. Look ma, see how I slack those tasks from my task processing system! Am I the best, or what? Now gimme some more tasks, please! Man, that feels soooo good!

Ok, I’m being sarcastic here, but slacking tasks from your lists can really become an addiction. And just because is associated with productivity doesn’t make it less dangerous or less of an addiction. It’s on the same league with smoking or alcohol. Really. Staying up late to slack tasks from your lists is doing no more good to you than spending the whole night drinking in a bar. You won’t have a hangover in the morning, that’s true, but you will feel the urge to slack them again in the evening. And will do this again and again. The results: you end up stealing time from your sleeping hours, from your social hours, from your family hours. All that in the name of being productive, how ridiculous is that?

Eat well. Sleep well. Exercise. Engage in physical activities and change your focus. Being caught in a constant flow of productive tasks will most likely generate a flow of positive emotions too. You’ll feel good about yourself and that is usually a feeling you want to keep as long as you can. That flow of ego boosting emotions can keep you being productive for hours without a break. But it’s tricky. Just because it feels good doesn’t mean it does good to your body. You need a balance. Pack some time in advance in your schedule and get out of that nice, ego boosting flow of being productive and do some physical exercise. Take a walk in the park. Eat a healthy meal. Take a nap. Then you can get back on being productive, with a fresh perspective.

***

To be productive without becoming a productivity freak is an art. The art of living your life in peace and harmony while still doing everything you planned to do, enjoying abundance and feeling happy and fulfilled.

How To Escape The Internet Jungle In 5 Small Steps

This is my first post by request. One of my readers, “an occasional blogger and a coach”, who runs the EffectivenessCoach blog, send me an email the other day. Besides the usual “hi, I saw we have similar interests and I’m also a blogger” the message had also a question:

“How can you structure your learning process on the Internet? I end up buried under tons of websites, blogs, webinars and you name it. Do you have any thoughts on this? Maybe a blog post about it?”

Well, the magic words were spoken: “a blog post about this”. Without further ado, let’s see how can we structure our learning process on the Internet:

Personal History

I am on the Internet for more than 14 years. Since the very beginning. I won’t tell you my Internet history here, as it has little to do with our main topic. But I will tell you a little story about my first Internet full-contact.

10 years ago I started my own web company. Part of it was of course, internet access. Maybe it sounds pre-historical, but believe me, that was a time when dial-up was mainstream. Having cable internet was still a dream. So, I had the chance to get an office in the same building with an Internet Service Provider. A simple ethernet link from them and voila: I had 10 mbs internet access. Wow! And I mean, WOW!

To make a long story short, the following 3 weeks are a black hole in my mind. I hardly remember anything from that time other than dumbly looking at hundreds and hundreds of websites. Without recollecting any of them, of course. At some point, I realized I started to lose weight, to stare at people without a specific reason and that also my sleep was completely screwed.

That was the moment I started to structure my own Internet learning strategy.

1. Isolate From It For A While

Internet is highly addictive. If you really want to take advantage of it, you must first isolate from it for a while. Find out what you really need first. Go online only when you have a clear image about what you want to incorporate. During the first 3 weeks of full-contact Internet I was looking at anything: graphics, forums, cars, tech, directory. Everything. After the first 3 weeks, I decided it’s time to focus on only several areas: learning the basics of server maintenance and PHP. For the next 6 months I didn’t do anything on the Internet except that.

Over the years I found this approach extremely effective. When I decided to start blogging I took a little bit of a break from my regular browsing habits. I just isolated for a few weeks and then I started to browse only blogs. And from blogs, only personal development blogs. And from personal development blogs, only the ones that I liked. Taking some distance from the source will surely help you decide how do you really want to use the source.

2. Restrain Your Insertion Points

How’s the home page of your browser looking? How are your bookmarks organized? How many feeds do you have in your feed reader? I ask because those are your insertion points on the Internet. You are entering the information highway through those roads. And if you have too many access roads you’ll be tempted to use them regardless of their value. Hence, losing precious time just browsing around.

I recommend having under 5 insertion points. One of them would be your feed reader, of course, and it’s your job to constantly peruse it and get rid of old or uninteresting content. The next ones are based on what I call “functional web”. For instance, I do a lot of research. And for research I use only Google. Usually the front page does the trick if I ask the good question. For interaction and human advice I use Twitter. And for growing relationships I use Facebook. As you may see, I still have one spot open.

3. Pick The Right Tools

Harvesting information is one of the most difficult tasks ever. Much more difficult than harvesting crops. This is why you’re going to need some tools. And your tools will be influenced by the type of information you’re harvesting. If you’re after design or art, you’re going to have a good image storing application. If you’re into writing, then some sort of database will have to be at hand. I use only 2 tools to organize my work, and those are Evernote and MacJournal.

Regardless of what type of information you’re harvesting, I think that, as a rule of thumb, any tool you’ll use needs to have at least those features:

• some sort of tagging or category grouping
• integrated search
• export capabilities in other formats
• online / backup capabilities

4. Transform It

After you have this setup in place, start to transform all this information into something useful. It could be a research project, a new career, a new business, whatever. Just make sure you use all the info and you’re not letting it slip away. A learning process must end with something comparable. Keeping a log of your learning activities will definitely help, but most of the time just assessing yourself at certain time intervals will do it too.

From my experience, feeling lost in the jungle of the Internet is often just an expression of a slow progress. Kind of like frustration. The information wave we’re trying to ride is so big that our efforts are looking insignificant. Having a clear way to assess progress will dramatically decrease frustration. Sometimes, just feeling good about what you’ve find on the Internet will alleviate your feelings of being lost in this jungle.

5. Create An Internet Free Day

Remember, your muscle grows not when you lift weights, but when you rest. Staying in contact with your learning source too much won’t make you smarter. On the contrary. You need time to incorporate that new information. You need distance to start making comparisons. You need some space to start making experiments. Staying away from the Internet is equally important if you’re really trying to learn something out of it.

Depending on your schedule and regular work, this Internet free day  may be a weekly day, or monthly day. What counts is that during that day you’re totally offline. A subtle effect is that you’re letting those outer energies work by themselves. I often find traffic spikes on my blog after taking an internet day off. It seems like if you’re staying too long there you start getting in the way of something. So, take a day off every once in a while.

***

That’s it. It’s only 5 steps but I’m sure it can be refined. Use it a starting point and create your own. And of course, add your suggestions in the comments.

I have to admit it was really fun to write a blog post on request. So, if you feel I may know the answer to a question that bothers you, feel also free to use the contact page and let me know about it. It might even get a public answer, like this one.

ADD stages – Do

ADD comes from “Assess, Decide, Do” and it’s a life management framework, initially described in this introductory post. As opposed to the regular productivity approaches, a life management framework focuses on a higher level integration and rejects the task checking approach as the only metric for measuring productivity performance.

In ADD, each individual can have only 3 main stages or can act in 3 main realms: the Assess realm, the Decide realm and the Do realm. Those stages are cumulative, in the sense that an imbalance in an early stage, like the Assess stage, can create negative consequences in the following stages. A balanced, constant flow between those 3 stages is the main metric of a fulfilling life management.

If you came here directly you may want to check out first the Assess realm and Decide realm posts.

Today will talk about the Do realm.

Closing The Circle

The Do realm is where you are closing the circle you started to draw by assessing and then deciding something. It’s the final stage and the most physical one. Usually, what you’re doing is something touchable, real, as opposed to the Assess or Decide stages, which are mainly mental activities. The Do realm is like the visible part of an iceberg. You know an iceberg can show only a small part on the surface, and this is the Do realm, but the core of it is under the water, in the initial Assess and Decide stages.

The Do realm is also one of the most refined and talked about by productivity experts. Much of the writing and methodologies created in the productivity area is focusing only on the Do realm, including GTD. Productivity and effectiveness are mistakenly defined as a consequence of the Do realm, when in fact they are a consequence of an entire Assess – Decide – Do cycle.

If you did your job in the Assess and Decide stages, you’re not actually doing much in the Do realm. The only three activities are scheduling, prioritizing and finishing.

Scheduling

You have to create an understandable and manageable time frame for your activities and this is done by scheduling. You’re allocating energy and space. You’re putting some order around you. We all live in time and making the most of our time is one of the best thing we can do.

Scheduling means in fact to acknowledge that you will be available for that specific task at a specific time. If you’re not scheduling your activities, you’ll actually reject them from your timeline. You’ll send a message of non-availability. But if you’re scheduling, you’re sending to yourself a message of availability.

As any other activity, scheduling can be improved, refined and automated. There are tons of books on how to use your time, and the intent of this post is not to offer a scheduling tutorial. All I want to stress is that one fundamental activity in the Do realm is scheduling, or sending messages of availability.

Prioritizing

Reality is changing. Your universe is changing. What was important yesterday may not be so important today, or tomorrow. Prioritizing your doing means give room to what’s important now as opposed to what you thought it was important yesterday. Prioritizing comes after scheduling and it’s an important, often ignored part of the productivity process.

Prioritizing will conflict with scheduling and that’s something normal. Prioritizing means giving space and energy to what’s important now and reschedule what was left out. Many people get confused when they have to make changes based on the priority of the tasks but that’s an important part of the Do realm.

How do you know what’s important and what’s not? Well, that is something you will have to micro Assess-Decide-Do every time. As I already mentioned, ADD is an abstract framework and supports any implementation you want. For instance, there will be a different prioritizing strategy in an ADD implementation for programming, than to an ADD implementations for relationships.

Finishing

If you start doing something, finish it. Or cut it out, if you can’t do it anymore. As simple and dumb as it sounds, finishing is a very important part of the doing process. So important, that I felt the need to make it a separate process.

One of the most subtle yet powerful ways to procrastinate (like really procrastinate, loosing your time) is to remain stuck in a project or task for ever. There is this pressure not to finish the task, because… well, because you’ll have to do something else. And you don’t want. Or you are scared. Or bored. Or whatever.

I’ve been there so many times that I had to come up with a finishing strategy. I’ve been caught in so many situations where finishing seemed strange or inconvenient or not appropriate that I really had to reconsider all my attitude towards finishing. I’m sure you’ve been there: caught in a sticky relationship, in a never-ending project, in a just-above-the-fold job, and so on.

Finishing is the most important part of doing something. It frees your resources, it makes room for something new and it feeds the next Assess session. If you’re not finishing what you’re doing, you’ll never be able to assess what you’ve done so far. Your ADD cycle will be stuck.

Creating Miracles

Doing is where the miracle takes place. By doing what you assessed and decided, you’re changing your reality the way you want. Assessing is just a perspective and the decision is just an intention. If those are not backed up with constant activity and with real life actions, your Assess-Decide-Do cycle will be broken.

But if you’re staying enough time in this cycle, if you succeed in Assessing, Deciding and Doing on a regular basis, if you engage totally in each part and let yourself flow freely through those stages, if you really become aware of the whole process, as simple and yet as powerful as it is, you’re going to create miracles.

Starting with yourself.

ADD stages – Decide

ADD comes from “Assess, Decide, Do” and it’s a life management framework, initially described in this introductory post. As opposed to the regular productivity approaches, a life management framework focuses on a higher level integration and rejects the task checking approach as the only metric for measuring productivity performance.

In ADD, each individual can have only 3 main stages or can act in 3 main realms: the Assess realm, the Decide realm and the Do realm. Those stages are cumulative, in the sense that an imbalance in an early stage, like the Assess stage, can create negative consequences in the following stages. A balanced, constant flow between those 3 stages is the main metric of a fulfilling life management.

If you came here directly you may want to check out first the Assess realm post.

Today will talk about the Decide realm.

What Is It?

The Decide realm is the place in which you intent to change your reality. You get in, put up the intention to modify your reality, and then you get out of it. You move immediately in the Do realm. The Decide realm nature is disruptive and powerful. It really challenges your current reality and it does this with a lot of force. It’s a hit and run approach. And it’s supposed to be like this.

As opposed to the Assess realm, where you can spend hours, days, weeks or months, the Decide realm is a very short one. You don’t live long in the Decide realm. Or, if you do, you have an ADD imbalance. And that would be the so called someday syndrome, a situation in which you allegedly took a decision, but never follow it. You remain stuck in this decision realm for ever.

The Decision Is In You

How do you know you actually took a decision and you’re not still in the Assess realm? How do you know it’s time to make a decision in the first place? How do you make that decision?

For many of us, decision seems to be driven by outside factors. We have to go to the job, we have to move out of the house for the errands, we have to pay our mortgage. We make these decisions in response to outside factors. Once the decision took, we move. Go to the job, to the grocery shop, we pay the bills. In fact, the decision is never driven by outside factors, it’s an internal process.

We take a decision after we can’t assess the facts anymore. If there’s nothing more to assess about our mortgage payment we make a decision: pay it. Or don’t pay it, of course. If we can’t assess anything more about the job, we go there, we immerse in the task. If it’s nothing more to add about our grocery shopping list, we go shopping. Or don’t and give room to other events in our life.

Decision Is A Reality Killer

Each decision you take will kill your current reality and will force you to replace it with another one, by going into the Do realm. You can recognize a decision by its level of reality destruction. If the decision will not change something in your reality, it’s not a decision, it’s still an assessment. If the decision will dramatically change your reality, you know it’s time to move on and create that reality.

For example, if you decide to go to your job, that will dramatically change your current environment: you’ll be in a different room, talking with different people and doing something different from what you’re doing now. If you’re going to the grocery shop, you’ll alter your reality by bringing in some more items. If you pay your mortgage, your reality will be modified also: you’ll have fewer money and you’ll be closer to completely pay your house.

So, the simplest and most accurate sign for recognizing a decision is its capacity of changing reality. If it’s not projecting a new reality, different from your current one, you’re not actually making a decision, you’re playing with your mind.

Choosing Your Personal Path

Taking the right decision is an art, so it’s living in the Assess realm, so it’s doing things in the Do realm. Identifying the best decision you can take at a certain point in your life it’s a key factor in your life management framework. In fact, your personal growth and evolution are dictated by your decision, not by your assessment, nor by doing. It’s what you decide that creates your reality, doing it is just an effect, not a cause.

You’re taking at least one decision each minute. You drive your focus and create your next reality all the time. Sadly, most of the time you’re doing it on auto-pilot. Without assessing. You’re just following old habits or established patterns. You’re living by reflex, not by miracle. Each decision you take is really a small miracle, because it reveals your creative powers. With each decision you actually modify your universe and create your desired world.

The core of your existence is in the Decision realm. The power of your self transformation is there, in the decision you take, in the realities your project for yourself, in the future you already see and embrace. So, instead of going to a job, assess more and see if that job really fits you. Instead of going to the grocery shop see if you can do something more interesting with your time. Instead of paying your mortgage see if you can pay it all in one leap.

Maybe the answer to all these will be: ok, I’ve assessed it and I can’t do anything about it right now. I’ll go to that job, I’ll go shopping and then I’ll pay my bill. But if you do this assessment constantly, something will change. Your decision will be influenced. Maybe after a while you’ll understand that your job is not fulfilling. Is something you’d like to change. And with this everything will change.

What you’ve just done is to broke an old, petrified flow in the Assess-Decide-Do pattern and create a new one. This is how life changes.

Small Decisions Or Big Decisions?

The power of a life management framework resides in its flexibility, in its power to adapt and adjust. You can apply this pattern to all processes, from your lifetime destiny and fulfillment to your day to day activities. As long as you correctly identify each stage in which you are acting, you have the power to rewrite those patterns.

There are no small or big decisions. Each decision is important and each decision has the power to change your world.

Maybe this post was a little bit on the emotional, not-so-factual, side, but I did it on purpose: I wanted to emphasize the importance of the decision realm as the core of your potential. ADD is just a framework and it supports any implementation you like, so I’ll be writing in the near future about specific usages of it, like ADD for relationships, ADD for career or ADD for a healthy lifestyle, so expect a more practical and day to day approach of the decision process in those posts.

Until then, be sure to create your reality carefully.